Sunday, October 30, 2011

Kelly Anne and I arrived at Erie Days of Gaming on Friday Night and set up her booth. She was selling hair sticks include some copies of Majestic Wilderlands and Blackmarsh. This included a nice selection of d20 hair sticks.

Friday proved to a very slow day. I brought my painting stuff and finished up the unpainted cauldrons that were in my collections.

Kelly Anne had a good suggestion of using the metallic green I had as highlight for the cauldrons with the icky green stuff. I thought they came out nice. Also shown is the last of the unpainted orc figures in my collection. Now every orc is painted and it off to finish up the unpainted official guards.

For Saturday I had two session slated. The first was to run another playtest of Night's Bride Coven. It was is a three level dungeon built into a cliff. It is the base for a coven of warlocks that the players were set to take out by the Invincible Overlord as they were frustrating his plans to colonize Dearthwood.

The adventure started well with the party killing a raiding party of Purple Claw orc. Given most current gamer unfamiliarity with older D&D, I have a straightforward combat encounter to get them used to the system.

For Night Bride's the party then has a choice of going to the base of the cliff or the top. The party elected to send all their hireling mercenaries to the base of the cliff. While the adventurers went to the top of the cliff. At the bottom they found a cave entrance and signaled the hirelings to charge into there. The party spotted a ledge twenty feet below and elected to repel down. Unfortunately the only thief in the party, Jasons of Underworld Ink, rolled very low for his climbing roll and plummeted to his death onto the ledge. A house rule in my game is that you don't die until you reach negative con, Jasons rolled a very low constitution for his thief. Then to compound the tragedy, one of the party's mage rolled a 1 for climbing and not only fell but missed the ledge completely and fell 60's to the base of the cliff. Needlessly he died as well. So we found out why hirelings are useful as the two took two of the mercernaries and rolled them up as fighters. It was good they had hireling left as the cave they charged into was filled with spiders and slaughtered 2/3rd of them.

The rest of the module went well. Unintentionally followed how the previous playtest went at Eriecon. However I ran out of time and had to cut it short before the final encounters. The players had it pretty much wrapped up with only one further death when one of the replacement characters, not Jasons but the other guy, fell into a pit with poisoned spikes. He just drew one of the remaining hireling and continued with the party.

Next was the game I was very excited play Traveller. It was the first time I played Traveller in 15 years and I went all out including setting up my referee screen just so.

I elected to use Classic Traveller and to have the player rolled up characters. The process proved to be more involved than I thought. The big omission was I didn't have any explanation of the cascade skills.

But with all the cards and cheat sheets I made it was borderline. Half of the players liked it and other half didn't. A couple of things I was going to use from Mongoose Traveller. First was their mishap table if any of the player blew their survival rolls, and second was I had a package of needed skills that the party could distribute among themselves. I may go with pre-gens next time.

We wound up with a Marine General who was a Baron, A one term Army Lieutenant, A Army General who was a Knight, A Scout, and a Rogue. The players were the crew of the Semper Fi and we quickly estabilshed that the Marine General was the owner/captain with the other players owning shares.

The adventure involved going to Focaline in the Aramis subsector. The players were contracted to deliver a cargo of breeding groat. Luckily for them they didn't have the Serenity problem of live cattle, instead they were in low berths.

The players had a lot of fun with the adventure, it involved Zhodani, Ancient artifacts, Vargrs, big guns, and all the usual Traveller fun stuff. Part of the adventure involved figuring out why a passenger spaced himself in the middle of the jump. One comment it I got was that it was like being part of a SF Short Story written by Phillip Dick before he gone bonkers. I was worried that it would play out like Adventure 3, Twilight Peak which also involves Zhodani, and Ancient artifacts but it played out much differently.

One interesting thing is that I studied the Traveller Combat and skills rules a lot to prepare for this game. However I didn't really use them at all. This seemed weird to me compared to the Majestic Wilderlands games when it hit me. It was pretty much how my original Traveller campaign went.

They play out like an old episode of Mission Impossible. The players figure out what they have to solve. Then they sit around the "coffee table" and discuss how to solve it. Finally execute the plan which usually involved surprise and overwhelming force.

I had a great time refereeing this and going to see how I can work this into a rotation of games at the Gold Star Anime.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Erie Days of Gaming will be held at the Avalon Hotel in Erie PA from Friday October 21st to Sunday the 23rd. I will be running two events on Saturday a Swords & Wizardry event and a Traveller event.

Night's Bride Coven, Saturday at 1:00 pmAn Original Edition Dungeons & Dragon adventure for 3 to 6 players. All materials are providedDeep in the forest a coven of warlocks weave their foul plans. Will the party end their reign of vile evil or become their next victim.Drive to Focaline, Saturday at 6:00 pmA Traveller adventure for 3 to 6 players. All materials are provided. Focaline is a backwater world of the Imperium noted for the raising of groats and cattle. The export of meat, and hides is a major part of the economy and the various ranchers are always looking for an edge. At the last minute an important cargo of breeding stock being delivered to Focaline was bumped from a major shipping line. Now the intrepid crew of the Semper Fi are hired to make this important delivery.I hope to see some of you there.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Erie Days of Gaming will be held at the Avalon Hotel in Erie PA from Friday October 21st to Sunday the 23rd. I will be running two events on Saturday a Swords & Wizardry event and a Traveller eventNight's Bride Coven, Saturday at 1:00 pmAn Original Edition Dungeons & Dragon adventure for 3 to 6 players. All materials are providedDeep in the forest a coven of warlocks weave their foul plans. Will the party end their reign of vile evil or become their next victim.Drive to Focaline, Saturday at 6:00 pmA Traveller adventure for 3 to 6 players. All materials are provided. Focaline is a backwater world of the Imperium noted for the raising of groats and cattle. The export of meat, and hides is a major part of the economy and the various ranchers are always looking for an edge. At the last minute an important cargo of breeding stock being delivered to Focaline was bumped from a major shipping line. Now the intrepid crew of the Semper Fi are hired to make this important delivery.I hope to see some of you there.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Sorry for the belated post. This for the September 28th session. I will have the notes for this week's session up on the weekend. After the conclusion of this adventure Boog survived to be 2nd level! Also I rolled maximum hit points for a total of 26!A bunch of rot grubs fell on Corum and Grim. Boog, Corum, and Grim manage to knock a few off. A few burrowed in and the party managed to burn them out. The shrine had a curtain made of flesh along with three wooden masks for the statue. Wolf, Goblin, and Bird. After searching the room the party went further in. Found a latrine and killed a goblin taking a dump. Pushing further in the party discovers a temple with four black goblins. The fight doesn’t go well and Boog fumbles his halberd away. Boog takes a potion of speed aging him by one year. The party manages to down the four black goblins when the Goblin Lord appears. It turned out that Boog was charmed a while ago by the Goblin Lord. The party had no choice to listen but to everyone’s surprise the Goblin Lord offered a truce along with information. As sign of good faith the Goblin Lord let Grim keep the glowing sword. We agreed to talk to Commander Sterling about the Goblin’s Lords Offer.

On the way back Grim saw a guild symbol drawn in the dirt of the path. Looking around he found Mo a fellow Halfling thief one of Waldron’s cronies. Mo is not happy with Waldron and told Grim that Waldron has set Bear’s traps along the path we were using. We headed back to the fort by a different way. We also learned that Waldron has five to seven men including Smoke and Manny.

Back the Bastion, the party got healed. While we were eating, Grim and Corum talked to Marshall one of the farmers. It turned out that Waldron is promising the farmers a lot if they would join him. Prall left the Bastion to join Waldron. We took Marshall to Sterling who was saddened that Manny left. Sterling mood picked up after we told of the truce offer and he readily agreed. The next morning the party headed back to the Goblin Lord to tell him that Sterling agreed to the truce. The Goblin Lord seemed pleased at this and told us that one of the outlying villages, Cason, was going to be attacked by Hobgoblins. He also gave Boog a +1 Ring of Protection. It can’t come off unless Boog decides to let it come off. The Goblin Lord also assigned one of his Black Goblins to accompany us. The party debated about whether to go after the Hobgoblins or Waldron and we decided that the Hobgoblins were priority. Cason was a day’s hike away so we left right away. Along the way we found a band of four hobgoblins and we ambushed them. The fight was nearly as bad as the Black Goblins and Boog injured his arm. Luckily it was his off arm so he was able to use his footman’s mace to continue fightings. Afterwards the party found a cave and retired for the night.Here is the adventure record.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

My friend Dwayne really likes the audiobook version of the Game of Thrones and wants to try playing a knight. Those of you with my Majestic Wilderlands know that I designed different regions with various fantasy sub-genres in mind. I just happened to have one area that works very well for a Game of Thrones like situation, Nomar.

I originally designed the area as the Majestic Wilderlands version of the Arthur myth. Given my interest in history and politics, the original design reflected more the politics of Arthur rather than the more fantastic elements. This makes it easy to adapt for a Game of Thrones like campaign and as the benefit of being it own "thing".

Since this is for my personal campaign the setting "present" is twenty years after the Majestic Wilderlands Supplement. Artos returned a decade ago, and reunified Nomar. But the promise of his return has ran aground against the reality of the situation. Artos is a brilliant leader but most days make him feel like he is herding cats. The Skandian Viking invaders are too numerous and too entrenched to be defeated in a single war. Now City-State under the regency of Duke Divolic has become a rising threat, and Nomar is besieged on all sides.

I prepare for this type of campaign by doing several things. First I draw a map, it serves an outline for all the things I need to detail next.

You can download a PDF of the map here. It includes two additional pages showing the local realms, and sub-domains.

I found out that CorelDRAW can export layered PDFs. If you use Acrobat Reader or another PDF Viewer that supports layers then you can download this file.

Next I will write up a short history, detail each sub-domain with a paragraph or two, and then write up a sentence or a paragraph on each of the personalities.

After that I will collect together what I call my Bag of stuff. A list of ideas and "bits" that I will combine to create the individual locales and minor personalities Dwayne will come across in his adventures.

Then I will make a timeline of what will happen if Dwayne's character didn't exist.

The campaign will be run using GURPS 4th edition. Still figuring out the exact number of points. I will also being adapting some mechanics from Green Ronin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Mostly chapter 6 on creating a house.

I will post what I give Dwayne. My main notes will have to wait for the campaign's conclusion.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.